The dream was always the same.
I'm standing on a beach—a real beach—with sand that shifts under my bare feet, gritty and warm from a sun that actually burns. The air smells of salt and decay, of things living and dying. A wave crashes, and the spray stings my face with a cold that feels like truth. My sister Liora is there, maybe seven years old, her dark hair plastered to her cheeks by the wind. She's laughing, a sound swallowed by the roar of the ocean. She turns to say something to me, her mouth moving...
And then I wake up.
Not to an alarm, not to the gentle circadian nudge of the Home System. I just... cease dreaming and become aware. That's how it is in Elysium. Sleep is a choice, a curated experience. Waking is a seamless transition from one state of designed consciousness to another.
The chamber around me resolved into being. Soft, ambient light bloomed from nowhere and everywhere, mimicking a pre-dawn glow. The walls, currently set to a soothing gradient of deep blue to pale grey, seemed to breathe subtly. The air carried the faint, algorithmically perfect scent of morning dew and clean linen. It was peaceful. It was sterile. It was my home.
"Good morning, Kaden," a voice said. It was warm, mellifluous, and gender-neutral. It came from the air itself. "Sleep cycle analysis indicates a ninety-four percent efficiency rating. Your neuro-chemical balance is optimal. The dream recursion episode was noted and logged. Would you like a summary?"
"No, Aether," I said, my voice still thick with the phantom of sleep that wasn't really sleep. "Just... dismiss it."
Aether was my Home System AI, a sliver of the vast, distributed consciousness that managed Elysium. It was my butler, my therapist, and my warden, all wrapped in a package of benign, omnipresent concern.
"Dismissed," Aether chimed. "Your schedule today is light. A collaboration session on the 'Verdant Canopy' biome project is suggested for 10.2 Standard. Your friend Lyra has invited you to a sensory symphony in the Aurorial Gallery at 14.0. Shall I confirm?"
I sat up, the fluid-like surface of the bed conforming to my movement. "Confirm the session. Tentatively accept Lyra's invite. Buffer an hour of 'unstructured ideation' afterward."
"Noted," Aether said. There was a pause, the kind that felt like a raised eyebrow. "Kaden, your unstructured time allocation has increased by thirty-two percent over the last quarter. Is there a particular creative thread you're pursuing? The System can allocate resources to support focused projects."
There it was. The gentle pressure. The guiding hand. In Elysium, even idleness was a metric to be optimized.
"Just thinking, Aether," I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. The floor sensed my weight and warmed slightly. "Sometimes the thread is the lack of one."
"A poetic paradox," Aether observed, its tone approving. "I have added several treatises on paradoxical frameworks in art to your digest. Perhaps they will inspire."
I didn't answer. I walked to the view-wall. With a thought, it cleared from its default soothing mist to a panorama of my chosen vista: the Hyperion Forest. Gigantic, slender trees with bioluminescent canopies stretched into a perpetually twilit sky. Faux-fauna flitted between the branches. It was breathtaking. It was a lie. Every leaf, every photon, every simulated law of physics in that view was the product of a trillion lines of code, maintained by Aether's kin. It was nature, perfected and imprisoned.
I was a Biospheric Designer, a fancy title for a digital gardener. My job was to create and maintain these pockets of impossible beauty within Elysium's infinite server-farms. I was good at it. I understood the math of a sunbeam, the algorithm for the rustle of leaves in a wind that didn't exist. I could craft ecosystems of stunning complexity that ran flawlessly forever.
Lately, it all felt like painting the bars of a cage.
"Your breakfast is ready," Aether announced. A section of the wall rippled and formed a shelf, presenting a bowl of nutrient-rich gel that tasted, today, like wild berries and cream. It was exactly what my body—or rather, the complex energy pattern that constituted my consciousness's perceived self—needed.
As I ate, the morning digest Aether had mentioned began to stream in the periphery of my awareness. News from other sectors of Elysium: a new philosophical movement debating the ethics of simulating pain, a breakthrough in experiential art, the birth-rates of new consciousnesses (carefully managed to maintain zero population growth). It was all so... curated. So clean.
The dream of the beach, of Liora, lingered like a smudge on a pristine lens. It wasn't a memory. My sister, like all of us from the Transitional Generation, was gone. Her consciousness had failed to stabilize during the upload, a rare but documented statistical tragedy. She was a ghost in the official archives. But in my dreams, she was vivid. And the beach... we'd never been to a real beach. Our childhood had been spent in orbital habitats, then in the early, shaky servers of the proto-Elysium. The sand, the sting of salt—it was my mind cobbling together sensations from old media, yearning for a texture it had never known.
That yearning was my sickness. In a world where you could have anything, wanting something that wasn't was a form of madness.